MSN Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw has David Wojnarowicz’s Just a Little Bit of the Tin Drum Mentality, 1984 (collage, acrylic, wood stick, string and globe, 48 x 48 x 17 in,) in their collection.
MSN curators write, “It is inspired by Volker Schlöndorff’s film The Tin Drum (1979), an adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel… Wojnarowicz mentioned the film in a letter to his lover Jean Pierre Delage dated November 5, 1980, describing it as “very strange and beautiful.” The collage features motifs recurring in Wojnarowicz’s works from the 1980s: the silhouette of a burning man, a globe, banknotes, a map. There is also the figure of a boy with blue skin, holding a drum.
The collage is characteristic of the later period of Wojnarowicz’s work, compositions resounding with criticism of modern civilization based on greed and hunger for power. In his art, Wojnarowicz conveyed a sense of apocalyptic threat, but also time woven in personal threads, inspirational readings, and his experiences as an activist. Of his collages from the 80s, Wojnarowicz wrote in his 1991 memoir, Close to the Knives: “First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien.”
MSN Warsaw is a public institution that collects works of art, and studies and disseminates the tangible and intangible legacy of contemporary culture. The museum cooperates with a range of groups and communities, as well as institutions in Poland and around the world.
Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie
ul. Marszałkowska 103
00-110 Warszawa
